


Out of That Story

by Callmesalticidae



Series: There is Nothing to Fear [12]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Hogwarts House Sorting, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Gryffindor Tom Riddle, POV Second Person, Wizard Fight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:35:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27035788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Callmesalticidae/pseuds/Callmesalticidae
Summary: There is a basilisk in the Great Hall. There is nothing to fear. (1982)
Series: There is Nothing to Fear [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1087368
Comments: 7
Kudos: 40





	Out of That Story

> It's like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.
> 
> Patrick Rothfuss

This is what it is like to be Albus Dumbledore:  
  
You are aged, a hundred and one years old, but you are not _elderly_.  
  
Nevertheless, you are going to die tonight. You have _come_ to die. In that respect, the outcome is predetermined.  
  
The only thing left is to show yourself, and secure a victory from your death.  
  
You are going to die—but doesn’t mean you are going to _lose_.

* * *

Fawkes brings you within sight of Hogwarts, but you elect to walk the rest of the way. You don’t know whether Fawkes would count against the demand that you come alone, and at any rate you’ll need a few minutes to gather yourself.  
  
You need time to think.  
  
Eighty minutes ago, it was all so clear: Riddle had been planning to strike the Hogwarts Express, but your show of obvious force, combined with a carefully, partially leaked plan to hold the entire Aurora Aureum and two dozen hit-wizards in reserve, had dissuaded Riddle from making his move.  
  
That was the whole point. You could have crushed him, perhaps, if you’d kept those forces hidden, but you made sure that Riddle knew they were there so that he wouldn’t strike at all. Victory would be hollow if it came at the cost of putting Britain’s children in the middle of a pitched battle.  
  
Forty minutes ago, the Ministry was attacked, and you realized that Riddle had never planned to attack the Express. They took out the Floo Network first, and then the Department of Mysteries cut contact with the outside world, either to mount a better defense or because Rookwood had already seized control. The Ministry had not quite fallen, but there were no front lines to speak of, only a patchwork quilt of rooms and hallways, some held, some contested, and little knowledge of which was which.  
  
You’d thought that was it. Riddle had finally gone for the throat, committing all his strength to a final attack to break the Ministry’s power, and part of you was glad to see it. You would be able to keep up the fight even if Riddle won, but if you could just defeat him here at the Ministry then it would all be over. It was a foolish move, high-risk and moderate-reward, brash and unwise as only Gryffindors could be.  
  
Twenty minutes ago, while you were coordinating with Amelia and Barty, you received Riddle’s message. His message from _within the school_.  
  
You realized, then, that all of it had been a diversion. Who could tell the difference between the entirety of the Death Eaters, and their entirety minus one? The Ministry could stand or fall, but that hardly mattered if Riddle slaughtered everyone at Hogwarts.  
  
You left, of course, and you can only hope that the battle for the Ministry does not suffer for your absence.  
  
The Scottish air is cool, almost cold, and the walk is dark. You press a potion to your lips, something atrocious to renew yourself, then banish the flask without another thought.

* * *

If you were a basilisk yourself then you might have smelled their fear before you reached the castle. Instead, you have to read it on their faces when you enter the Great Hall—and ignore, with sorrow and disgust for your failures, the faces which brighten with hope when you arrive.

Riddle stands there, maskless, smiling, holding the Sorting Hat in one hand and the sword of Gryffindor in the other. You could strike him down right now, and he knows it, but the basilisk is still here, quietly circling the room, too difficult to kill before the children were killed, and he knows that as well.  
  
“I wanted to make sure that you saw,” he says. “I wanted to make sure you knew.” Slowly, the sword goes into the hat, and then the hat itself disappears. “Well? Any final boasts or pleas before we commence?”  
  
Riddle is a legilimens, perhaps the most accomplished of his generation, and against that there is only one defense: occlumency of the most rigorous, exacting variety. You cannot allow yourself to think about what you cannot allow yourself to think. You can scarcely let yourself realize that there are unsafe thoughts at all.  
  
Even to yourself, you must misdirect and lie so thoroughly that the deception is invisible even to yourself.  
  
This is a rare level of mastery.  
  
This is what it is like to be Albus Dumbledore.

* * *

There are no courteous bows. There are no niceties of ceremony. There are two wands in Riddle’s hands, and there is one in yours, and there is a fight to your death.  
  
You withdraw to the Entrance Hall almost immediately, taking him away from the children. They should not have to see this, and they cannot be put in more danger.  
  
His opening salvo is a flock of cutlery, forks and knives, no less dangerous than swords at their present velocity. His second is a variant of the Blasting Curse. You transmute the silverware to fans and napkins, then block one Blasting Curse and redirect the other, shattering part of the marble stairway to your right.  
  
With a jab of his wand, marble fragments rise from the floor, assembling themselves into a crude facsimile of your own form. It shudders and lumbers toward you with outstretched fingers, and you banish it into the wall, then aim another Banishing Charm at the floor beside your feet—unorthodox, but it hurls you partway up the steps.  
  
“Is this the great Dumbledore in whom Britain trusted? Is this the vanquisher of Grindelwald, the savior of Europe, the supreme foe whom even my Death Eaters feared?”  
  
In the gaps between his words, Riddle hurls curses. It is a simple thing to talk and incant at once, if the latter can be done silently.  
  
Still, you have no patience for his words, and you fuse his mouth shut. You shouldn’t have. He runs the tip of one wand along the seam and his lips reopen, blood running down his chin. Under the direction of his other wand, the blood turns to fire before it hits the floor, and the flames spread from wall to wall.  
  
“I expected better.”  
  
There can be no killing blow. You can trip him, ensnare him, wear him down with a thousand cuts, or bind his limbs, and you attempt all these and more, but you cannot kill him or even render him unconscious, and for that reason you are doomed to lose.  
  
He has an arsenal of spells to bring to bear and no reason to hold them back, whereas, if you were to do the same, you would with the same incantation speak a death sentence for hundreds of children.  
  
You transfigure the flames to ice, and the black-burned hallway shines like a glass sculpture. He shatters the rimy fire, and their beauty becomes another broken, ugly weapon.  
  
You are going to die.  
  
Light flashes from his wands, twin suns that radiate with blinding effulgence. You duck into a classroom to catch a moment’s time, long enough to restore sight to your eyes, then disintegrate the wall to your left and move to the next room over.  
  
You are going to die.  
  
There’s a pile of stacked desks here. Scant seconds later, they’re a sounder of boars, charging out of the room with tusks like sabres. Beneath Riddle’s bewitchment, they turn on one another, gore each other in mutual slaughter. You end the transfiguration, returning their bloodied carcasses to smashed and splintered wood, which reaches for Riddle like the limbs of a venomous tentacula while you remove yourself to a more advantageous position at the head of the third floor stairway.  
  
This is a tactical withdrawal. It is a strategic withdrawal, as well. You will die, and the Ministry will either stand or fall, but the greater part of the Aurora Aureum will survive, go underground for a season, then rally and return.  
  
You only have to keep him occupied for a little while, long enough for the Ministry’s fate to be decided—crucially, without Riddle’s involvement—and for preparations to be made. Come next year, there will be a reckoning and he will lose the war for good.  
  
You are going to die. But it will be enough for you to die on your own terms.  
  
The stairs move even as you climb them and turn to tar beneath your feet. Quick counterspelling takes care of that, but in the meantime Riddle conjures birds, black-feathered and sharp-beaked. The first to die explodes viciously and messily, and its blood seems closer to dissolutional alkahest than any natural fluid. You freeze the others, winged ice blocks falling to the floor.  
  
Step by step, he closes the distance and you fail to widen it again, and every countercurse and untransfiguration comes just a little more slowly than the last.  
  
It’s okay.  
  
Knowing how to win is important. Pretending to lose can be just as vital.  
  
It helps, of course, that you can win by losing, that occupying Riddle’s attention is enough.  
  
“Get up. _Get up_. Stand like a wizard. _Look_ at me.” He grins, ever so slightly, and approaches. “I’ll lie, of course. I’ll tell them you died well. Not like this, running scared, slumped against a wall at the end of it.”  
  
He’s taking too long. You don’t know why. You can’t afford for him to—  
  
You put the thought away and force yourself to look up. Look him in the eye. Let him look at you, think to plunge into your mind, and in the second that his guard is down, your wand-hand twitches and you strike him one last time.  
  
_Constant vigilance_ , you think, the words bubbling up like a phantom gas, and you struggle to keep it down, to...to think about the here and now, untroubled by the specters of the past.  
  
(You can scarcely think of Alastor now. You _can’t_ think of Alastor now.)  
  
Riddle practically flies backward, hitting the wall behind you so hard that you worry, for a moment, that he has lost consciousness, but then he laughs and you relax.  
  
Slowly, with obvious pain and effort, he begins to push off the floor, almost having to peel away from it. When Riddle turns to you, it’s obvious where the curse landed: where his left eye should be, there is a gaping, bleeding crater, stretching nearly from nose to ear.  
  
Riddle stands. His wands are gone, and the Sorting Hat is in his right hand. As he walks toward you again, he draws the sword, as he must have done in the Great Hall, swiftly and with purpose. The Sorting Hat falls, useless to him for any further purpose, and then your body lifts off the ground, suspended in place, back pressed flat against the wall.  
  
He runs the blade clean through your chest from the tip to the hilt, and there is pain, white-hot and searing, sickening and spreading through your body like an infection. You gasp, and Riddle, with his free hand, wrests your fingers open and seizes your wand.  
  
“It is done,” he says.  
  
You don’t say anything. It isn’t necessary to confirm his knowledge. It is there on his face, as if it had been carved with deep-cut runes.  
  
Your wand, the Elder Wand, is in his hand, nestled within tight-curled fingers, but the sight of him, the appearance of his broken face, shedding blood like heavy tears, threatens to bring a smile to your face nonetheless. You know how he will be beaten. All of this, leading up to one precious moment yet to come...  
  
Just as quickly as the thought comes to you, it is cast out of your mind, buried beneath the weight of a thousand memories, suppressed so heavily that it will take Riddle minutes to uncover it, precious minutes which he does not have, because you do not have them, because of this sword, this thing that has stuck you to the wall like a trophy.  
  
He should not have killed you, not yet, and that knowledge is enough to make you content, enough to make you, now, finally, smile without reservation, as he smiles back  
  
Let him smile. Let him think he’s won.  
  
Let him try to call you by the power of the Resurrection Stone, even. You came to die. You’ve made preparations for that already, and you try to raise that knowledge to the forefront of your mind, to make sure that he knows it, that he sees, in his moment of triumph, the truth of his failure.  
  
This is what it is like to be… This is what…  
  
What?  
  
Albus Dumbledore.  
  
Yes. Right.  
  
—and then there is nothing and no one to be like anybody.

* * *

There is peace.

* * *

This is what it is like to be Albus Dumbledore, remembering what it was like to be Albus Dumbledore.  
  
You are cold. This surprises you, the discovery that you can feel cold.  
  
It takes you a moment to recognize the room, little of which is how you left it. Gone is the rotating tower, the telescope, the planetarium, and there are none of the curio cabinets or soft-whirring and smoke-puffing instruments which you fondly remember collecting.  
  
This is the headmaster’s office, and the school is under new management: Many of your old books are here, sometimes even on the same shelves as before, but they have new books for company, tomes on legilimency, on enchantment, on souls and on the Dark Arts. The room is spartan in its bare simplicity, but off to one corner is a soft-looking dog’s bed, currently unoccupied.  
  
Before you sits Tom Riddle. The wound on his face, vast and hideous, no longer bleeds, but he has apparently made no attempt to hide the damage or even to replace his eye. To his left, on the desk, sits your old pensieve. On his finger, twisted out of place, the Gaunt family ring, and the Resurrection Stone that makes its centerpiece.  
  
He clasps his hands, one against the other. Leans forward. Smiles.  
  
“Welcome back, Albus. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

**Author's Note:**

> There will now be an intermission.
> 
> Updates will be biweekly from here on out. 
> 
> The writing style of this story owes a lot to Matthew Stover's novelization of Star Wars Episode III.


End file.
